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Richard Etlin, “Architecture and the Sublime,” in Timothy Costelloe, ed.

, The Sublime:
From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 230-73.

This article has a dual focus. On the one hand, it traces the history of the tradition of the
floating and rotating dome and relates it to the idea of the sublime. On the other hand, it
delves into the phenomenological component of the sublime as discussed in philosophy
and as presented in literature and in architecture in relationship to expansive space. In the
process, it distinguishes between the architectural sublime, the cosmological sublime, and
the spatial sublime.

Authors, artists, and philosophers discussed: Longinus, Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Ovid,
Aratus, Lucretius, Virgil, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, Macrobius, Procopius, Paulus
Silentiarius, Agathias, Dante, Christoforo Landino, Brunelleschi, Antonio Manetti,
Bernardo Bembo, Pietro Bembo, Mantegna, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Vasari, Antonio
Labacco, Michelangelo, Correggio, Cellini, Primaticcio, Gabriello Simeoni, Philibert
Delorme, Marguerite de Navarre, Luigi Alamanni, Milton, Samuel Johnson, Edmund
Burke, John Baillie, Alexander Gerard, Johann Georg Sulzer, Alexander Baumgarten,
Boileau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Shaftesbury, Francesco Algarotti, Étienne-Louis
Boullée, Julien-David Leroy, August Schmarsow, Charles Blanc, T. S. Eliot, Rudolf
Otto, Eugène Minkoski, Richard Shusterman

Principal buildings discussed: Nero’s Domus Aurea (Golden House), Pantheon, Temple
of Venus and Rome, Diocletian’s Mausoleum, Orthodox Baptistery in Ravenna,
Theodoric’s Mausoleum, Hagia Sophia, Justinian’s Church of the Holy Apostles,
Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Cathedral of Parma, Giulio Romano’s
Palazzo del Te, Philibert Delorme’s Château d’Anet, Primaticcio’s Gallery of Ulysses at
Fontainebleau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s Dome of the Invalides, Boullée’s Cenotaph to
Sir Isaac Newton (project) and his Métropole (project)

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